Inside the lab: Training your immune system to fight cancer

July 11, 2016
| by Denise Heady

Christine Brown, Ph.D.

Soon, brain cancer will be treated differently. Just ask scientist Christine Brown, Ph.D. A nationally known researcher and newly appointed Heritage Provider Network Professor in Immunotherapy at City of Hope, Brown is on the forefront of a specific kind of immunotherapy: CAR-T cell therapy. This type of therapy trains patients’ own immune system to kill cancer cells.

Brown, with chief of neurosurgery Behnam Badie, M.D., F.A.C.S., is currently conducting a first-in-human phase 1 trial for patients with advanced brain tumors. This trial uses a patients’ own modified T cells to fight their tumors and is designed to target the tumor head-on by delivering the treatment directly into the brain.

City of Hope is one of only a few cancer centers in the United States offering human studies in CAR-T cell therapy, and is the only cancer center investigating CAR-T cells in injection form, administered directly to brain tumors.

Here, Brown, associate director of the T Cell Immunotherapy Laboratory at City of Hope, tells us how this type of therapy works and what it means for future treatment.

What is CAR-T cell therapy?

CAR-T cell therapy is an exciting and novel approach to cancer therapy, in which a patient’s immune system is reprogrammed to recognize and hopefully destroy their tumor.

How does this type of therapy work?

We isolate T cells from a patient, activate them and engineer them to express a novel cancer targeting receptor — termed a CAR. We then expand the reprogrammed T cells to large numbers and infuse them back to the patient as a personalized form of immunotherapy.

How is City of Hope using CAR-T therapy?

City of Hope has been one of the leaders in the CAR-T cell field. We are making breakthroughs using this therapy for many different types of cancers. For brain tumors, we’re very excited about our progress in targeting a novel receptor expressed by glioblastoma, and our unique local delivery strategy. We believe these innovations will make a difference in improving patient outcomes.

How is this therapy being used to treat brain tumors?

We are doing groundbreaking work against many different cancers using this therapy - including brain tumors. For brain tumors, City of Hope was the first to apply CAR-T cell therapy to patients with glioblastoma, which is one of the most difficult to treat solid tumors.

I believe that CAR-T cells have dramatic potential, not only against solid tumors, but one of the most difficult to treat solid tumors - glioblastoma.